


How to Make a Home

by livethekind



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-14
Updated: 2012-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 22:35:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/459242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livethekind/pseuds/livethekind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is his Disciple, she follows him, and if his life is circular then she's copying his motions, step by step.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Make a Home

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Homestuck Shipping Olympics, Bonus Round 1. The prompt was "Signless<3Disciple, Absurdism + 12-Step Guide."

**One;** They fill the room up with chairs.

"Why?" He asks her as he carries them in: armchairs, straight chairs, chairs with no backs and chairs with no legs even. The Disciple springs from chair to chair, never settling, testing them all. He doesn't know what she's doing, but she finds no comfort in any of them.

"Well," she says, moving from a couch to a stiff-backed dining chair, "It's about finding the purrfect one! Something that says we have a comfurtable home. Maybe we should just keep them all?"

**Two;** She _settles_ \-- he will not say that she agrees, because it's obvious that she's not happy with any of the chairs. So he goes out and buys her a clock, a large and ornate grandfather clock that some highblood had obviously discarded. He thinks that it will please her -- and comfortable homes have clocks...right?

When she asks why he bought a broken clock, he realizes he never thought to check if it wound up.

**Three - Six;** They buy a bunch of clocks.  
And then they break them all.

The futility of it -- the fun in finding something that gives them precision and then breaking it open, revealing the parts and smearing them across the home -- seems fitting for their home where they can't find anything that makes it perfect. He feels like she might enjoy this more than the attempt to make their home perfect, but he's wrong. And when the clocks are all broken and the gears ground to dust, she brushes herself off, steps around the mess, and sits down with her paints, staring at the walls.

**Seven;** So he paints them, he paints them for her because it hurts him to see her unhappy, so unfulfilled. He even enlists her help, and her clawprints and the pads of his fingers combine to make red and green swirls all over the walls. She giggles and laughs, he even smiles for her, but something's just not quite right.

"I don't like it. Should we paint over it and then try again?"  
He agrees, unwillingly. Their masterpiece is covered by white, austere walls, their love hidden behind some cloth, some chairs.

**Eight;** They fight.

"What are you looking for? What do you think you're even doing?"  
"I want it to be purrfect for us! I thought you understood that!"  
"It's like you're looking for the bottom of a fucking endless well, that's what I understand!"  
"I hate when you say things like that, it hurts my feelings!"

He sleeps on one of the numerous couches that night.

**Nine - Ten;** They make up and it's wild, passionate embraces in the middle of all the mess in their house, pulling each other close and somehow it's still not enough, through the anger that turns into lust, pure and simple, until they're crashing into the recuperacoon and staring into each other's eyes and he still doesn't understand. It's like watching something repeat itself, small circles in the pattern of an insignificant life. Really, he wonders how she manages to cope with it. He knows they won't have much time left together -- people could come for him any day -- but he wants to make it worth her while.

After she falls asleep, he realizes that perhaps, these small circles in her life are the way she copes. She is his Disciple, she follows him, and if his life is circular -- live, pace and preach, die -- then she's copying his motions, step by step.

**Eleven;** He's in the middle of buying her a wriggler's flip-book -- infinite motion, a picture of a meowbeast rolling in circles -- when they find him, grabbing him by the arms and dragging him off.

The wind makes the pages flip back and forth; the meowbeast rolls in circles, never getting anywhere.  
He wonders if it was worth it.

**Twelve;**

When he dies,  
she makes an homage to him,  
small circles on the walls of her cave,  
circles  
filled with scripture, filled with chairs  
clock gears  
meowbeasts  
and all the things she never got to share with him  
red and green  
the thing that didn't last.


End file.
